Learning To Disconnect

I’m learning to disconnect a lot more lately, trying to get off my phone and not be so attached to it. It’s hard to learn to let go, there’s always the fear of missing something important but it’s so important to try to live in the moment more and take more time for myself. This year I’m really trying to take a lot more time for myself to just relax, I wrote a post on what I do to try to decompress when I’m really stressed and overwhelmed. I find myself in this mental state that I just don’t want to interact with anyone for a day and I just kind of go completely ghost for a while. It’s not good and I know I need to take more time to disconnect more often so I don’t hit that point as much anymore.

A surefire way to disconnect is to get lost in something else, whether you put on some music and cook or bake something without looking at your phone or finding a hobby to do that’s completely offline, there’s so many ways to get lost in something else so you don’t even realize a few hours have passed since you last checked your phone. Other great ways to get fully absorbed in something other than your smartphone: reading, binge on an amazing show, go for a run/exercise.

Make plans and goals and stick to them. Whether you decide to download the app Moment and limit your phone time to an hour and a half every day or have a running list of things you want to do so you never find yourself mindlessly scrolling through social media. Give yourself a ton of ways to go screen-free and try to work them into your daily life.

Try to avoid that “what do I do now?” feeling that always gets me on Instagram for 45 minutes straight. Find things you like to do that you can do by yourself. I love doing little coding lessons online, working on my blog, painting my nails, just little things to fill time when I’m either waiting for plans to start or just spending a night in. Maybe when you’re bored you just make some cupcakes to share at work or with friends, anything to just give yourself some screen-free time.

If you’re really serious about this, try to delete your “vice” social media app. I feel like everyone has that one social media app that they could scroll through for hours and usually do end up scrolling through for hours. For me it was Instagram and I deleted the app off my phone for two months and I found myself interacting with people a lot more, so much lighter without seeing all those posts that upset me all the time, etc etc etc. Overall it just made me feel so much lighter and I love doing that once or twice a year, it’s very cleansing. If you get really upset watching Snapchat stories, maybe that’s a sign you should delete the Snapchat app off your phone for a month or even two weeks, see how it makes you feel and try to bring that feeling back when you redownload the app. For me, redownloading Instagram was weird, I only went on it for a few minutes each day and unfollowed 250 people that made me upset whenever they posted. I made the app work for me and the goals I wanted to reach.

If you can’t bear to delete the apps off your phone, try turning off the push notifications. Especially Instagram where you can tend to someone tagging you in a post in a few hours, nothing needs immediate attention. That helps me stay off those apps much more than I thought it ever would.

If you’re brave, try not checking your phone until an hour or two hours after you wake up. I have not been able to do this as I go to bed quite early and usually end up with about 50 messages in group chats to catch up on. If you can do this even once a month I’m sure it would be very cleansing. I’ll have to give this a try sometime, even writing about it has got me thinking about how good that would feel.

With blogging, it’s hard to take a lot of those social media apps off my phone and being a teenage girl it’s hard to get all those things go. It’s so hard to try to ignore the fact that I could be missing so much without my phone glued to my hand but I always get so burned out whenever that’s my mindset. Those things will be there when you come back, it’s okay to let them go for a few hours. How do you disconnect?